Hiller Answered the Darren Raddysh Question, and It Wasn't Jake McCabe

The Darren Raddysh partner question got an answer nobody predicted

The single most consequential unsettled item on the Maple Leafs blue line was the Darren Raddysh partner question, and Jim Hiller answered it at the first practice of camp without saying a word about it. Raddysh skated with Oliver Ekman-Larsson. Jake McCabe skated with Chris Tanev.

That is not what the consensus expected. The projection that had gathered the most support through August and early September — including our own — was McCabe with Raddysh, splitting Toronto's established shutdown pair in order to give the club's new right-shot puck-mover a genuine defensive anchor. Hiller kept the shutdown pair intact and handed Raddysh to a 35-year-old left shot with a reputation that does not match his actual game.

On reflection, it is the better call. Not obviously, and not without risk. But better.

Why splitting McCabe and Tanev was always the expensive option

McCabe and Tanev worked. That is the uncomfortable part of the argument for breaking them up. Toronto's defensive problems last season were not concentrated in the minutes those two played together; they were concentrated in almost everything else. Taking the one pair that reliably suppressed chances and dismantling it to solve a different problem is the kind of move that solves nothing and creates a second hole.

The logic for doing it anyway was Raddysh. He arrived as the most significant addition to the blue line, a right shot who moves pucks and runs a power play, and the fear was that pairing him with anyone other than a true defensive anchor would expose him. Raddysh has never played top-four minutes in a role like this for a team with these expectations.

But that fear rests on a reading of Raddysh that the tape does not support. He looks like a heavy, defence-first defenceman. He does not play like one. He is a transition player whose value comes from retrievals, exits and puck distribution, and pairing him with a partner whose entire identity is retreat would waste most of what Toronto paid for.

Ekman-Larsson is a better defensive player than his reputation

The case for Ekman-Larsson with Raddysh starts with an honest accounting of what Ekman-Larsson actually is at this stage of his career, which is not what most people assume. The Arizona-era contract still shapes the public perception. It should not. He has spent the past several seasons as a competent, physical, occasionally mean defenceman who defends better than his reputation suggests and moves pucks without being the pure offensive conduit his profile implies.

We made that argument earlier this month, calling him the most underrated defenceman on the roster. Hiller appears to have reached something like the same conclusion, and the pairing works precisely because both players defy their archetypes in the same direction. Neither is the player his build and résumé advertise. Put together, they can share the defensive load rather than assigning all of it to one man and all of the offence to the other.

What this means for Morgan Rielly

The pairing that did not exist on Thursday matters as much as the ones that did. Morgan Rielly was not on the ice, sidelined by a viral condition the club expects him to shake in time for the September 29 opener. With McCabe-Tanev and Ekman-Larsson-Raddysh occupying the top four, the pair Rielly returns to is the third pair.

That is a real demotion in a season Rielly can least afford one. It may also be temporary — a 13-day camp with a key veteran missing the opening days forces a coach's hand regardless of his long-term plan. But Hiller did not construct these pairs around Rielly's absence in any obvious way. Andrae with Danford and Stecher with Blankenburg is a third and fourth pair of players fighting for jobs, not placeholders keeping a seat warm for a former top-pair defenceman.

If Rielly returns next week and slots in beside Ekman-Larsson while Raddysh moves to McCabe, the whole reading changes. If he returns and skates with Andrae, it does not.

The risk in this construction is real

Here is what could go wrong. Ekman-Larsson is 35. Tanev is 36. McCabe has a long injury history. Toronto's top four now leans heavily on three players in their mid-thirties or with durability questions, which is precisely the criticism that has followed this defence group all summer. The Ekman-Larsson-Raddysh pair asks a 35-year-old to handle the harder defensive half of a second-pair assignment against opposing top-six forwards over 84 games.

Eighty-four games is the number that keeps coming back. The new CBA added two regular-season games and cut two preseason games, which means more mileage and less runway. A defence built on veterans who need managed workloads is going to be tested by the calendar in a way no previous Leafs blue line has been.

What Raddysh was actually brought in to do

It is worth stating plainly, because the pairing only makes sense once you do. Raddysh is not a replacement for a shutdown defenceman. He is a replacement for the puck movement Toronto lost and never adequately replaced, and he is the right-handed option on a power play that finished 25th in the league last season.

That job description carries specific requirements for a partner. Raddysh needs someone who will let him be the first man up the ice on a retrieval rather than someone who wants the puck himself on every exit. He needs a partner comfortable holding the far side of the blue line while Raddysh activates. And he needs a partner who will not compound errors when an aggressive read goes wrong, because aggressive reads are the entire point of having him.

Ekman-Larsson fits all three. McCabe fits the third one and arguably the first, but McCabe's value is highest beside Tanev, where the pair's job is to take the hard minutes and give them back clean. Using McCabe as Raddysh's safety net would have been the more conservative deployment of both players, and conservative deployment of a $4 million-plus blue line is how a team ends up 25th on the power play again.

Hiller is telling you something about how he wants to defend

Every new coach's first practice is a document. Hiller's said that he intends to defend with pairs rather than with individuals — two players sharing responsibility across the ice rather than one defensive specialist and one offensive specialist stapled together. That is consistent with what we have heard about the structure he ran in Los Angeles, which leaned on layered five-man coverage rather than isolating a shutdown pair against a single opposing line.

If that holds, the McCabe-Tanev pair will not be used the way Craig Berube used it. Instead of an every-shift matchup weapon deployed against the opposition's best, it becomes the pair that stabilizes the defensive zone while the forward group does more of the matchup work — which is exactly why Hiller described the Cowan-Paul-Sissons line as a group that can handle other teams' best players.

That is a coherent plan. It also puts a great deal of weight on a third forward line whose members have a combined handful of NHL seasons in matchup roles.

Our take: this is the right structure, wrong depth chart

Keeping McCabe and Tanev together is correct. Giving Raddysh a partner who can defend without being purely defensive is correct. What is not yet correct is the bottom half. Toronto is carrying 25 defencemen through camp largely because it does not know what its third pair is, and the two candidates who skated Thursday — Andrae with Danford, Stecher with Blankenburg — represent a 23-year-old, a 20-year-old, a journeyman and a PTO.

That is not a third pair. That is a list of possibilities. And with William Villeneuve lost for the year to ACL reconstruction, one of the internal options is gone for the year. John Chayka has done a great deal of work on this roster; the last unsolved piece is the bottom pair, and camp will not manufacture a solution that is not already in the building.

What's next

Saturday's split-squad games against Montreal give Hiller his first live look at whether the Darren Raddysh partner experiment holds up against NHL opposition. Watch whether Ekman-Larsson and Raddysh get matched against Montreal's top group in the Scotiabank Arena half of the doubleheader, and watch what happens when Rielly returns to the ice. Those two data points will tell you whether Thursday was a plan or a placeholder. Toronto has four preseason games to decide, and then Montreal on September 29 for real.